February 2014

February 26, 2014

Editorial Director Ken Wissoker has announced that he will be moving to New York City where, in addition to continuing his job with Duke University Press, he will be a Visiting Distinguished Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center. At the Graduate Center, Ken will start a program he is currently calling "Intellectual Publics" which will sponsor talks or conversations aimed at working through emergent academic concepts. Ken says, "My sense is that New York has too many 92nd Street Ys devoted to translation of intellectual ideas (or allowing artists and others to be more reflective than usual) and not enough common ground for academics and others caring about the kind of ideas Duke publishes."

“We could not be more delighted that Ken Wissoker is joining the Graduate Center. Ken is a marvelous editor and has a keen grasp of some of the very best current scholarship in the humanities and social sciences,” said Louise Lennihan, the Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. “He has a substantial international and national network of scholarly contacts, and it is a very exciting prospect that he will draw on them in his programming at the Graduate Center. The entire New York scholarly community and intellectual public will benefit from Ken’s presence.”

Ken will continue to acquire books and shape the Duke University Press list. His authors will continue to see him when he represents the Press at conferences. While continuing to publish innovative work, he will also be looking to foster new ideas in a public way. Ken says, "I'm excited about the opportunity and grateful to the creativity and flexibility at the Press and the Graduate Center which has made this innovative and synergistic position possible."

Ken is turning his day-to-day department management duties over to Editor Courtney Berger. He will travel to Durham a few days each month for meetings. Although staffers at the Press will miss our daily interaction with Ken, this is an exciting opportunity for collaboration and we hope it will lead to increased visibility for the Press and our authors. Congratulations, Ken!

February 21, 2014

At Duke University Press, we always appreciate when our books and journals are recognized, even in the most round-about ways. When we see a DUP journal in the wild, it’s always a thrill, even more so when that ‘wild’ is in popular culture.

Our journal New German Critique makes a cameo in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book The Lowland, when several issues of the journal are given to a character for her studies:

“He returned to the desk and wrote down the names of a few books he recommended, telling her which chapters were most important. From the shelves he lent her his own copies of Adorno and McTaggart, with his annotations. He gave her copies of New German Critique, indicating some articles she should read.” (Lahiri, 2013)

Another reference to our journals in popular culture comes from the movie, Stranger than Fiction, released by Colombia Pictures in 2006. Dustin Hoffman carries around his copy of Poetics Today while advising Will Ferrell’s character on his possible status as a fictional being.

Duke University Press author Sol Yurick, who passed away in 2013, had his most famous novel, The Warriors, made into a movie in 1979.The film holds a cult classic place in cinema history and is referenced countless times in media and pop culture. One of Yurick’s other novels was also adapted into the movie The Confession in 1999, starring Ben Kinglsey and Alec Baldwin.

Around the Press, Yurick is known for writing quite a few articles for our journal Social Text, including:

"Some Notes on Iraq" (#27)

"How the Athenians Planned to Colonize the West and Immortalize Themselves" (#23)

"The Destiny Algorithm" (#19/20)

"Faust's Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and the Takeoff into Transcendence" (#17)

"The Other Side" (#9/10)

Have you seen our books and journals referenced in pop culture? Send us a photo on Twitter—we want to know! @DUKEpress

February 19, 2014

Congratulations to our book and journal designers for being recognized for excellence by the Association of American University Presses! Four books and one journal are being featured in this year's AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal show.

Precarious Japan by Anne Allison was recognized in the Scholarly Typographic category. Courtney Leigh Baker was the designer.

Traveling Heavy by Ruth Behar, designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan, was also recognized in the Scholarly Typographic category.

Christopher Wright's The Echo of Things, designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan, was recognized in the Scholarly Illustrated category.

Alternative Medicine by Rafael Campo, also designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan, was recognized in the Poetry and Literature category and in the Jackets and Covers category.

February 17, 2014

Last week we enjoyed selling books and meeting authors at the 2014 annual meeting of the College Art Association in Chicago. We were glad our staff got out of Durham in time to miss the huge snowstorm that closed the university for three days. For once the weather may have been worse here than in Chicago!

We were thrilled to congratulate T. J. Demos on his winning of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. The awards committee said that his book The Migrant Image "eloquently analyzes contemporary art that engages the current political reality of continual humanitarian crises while maintaining an open-ended appeal to the imagination."

It was also exciting to participate in the launch of the Art HIstory Publication Initiative's new website. The AHPI is a partnership of university presses whose mission is to help bring art history publishing into the digital age by tackling some of the obstacles that have made it difficult for scholars and publishers to take advantage of evolving digital technologies. Editorial Director Ken Wissoker took part in the "Getting Published in the Digital Age" panel with other AHPI members.

Our first book produced with funds from the AHPI is Hannah Feldman's From a Nation Torn. Here she is with her brand new book.

At a press conference he initiated to address the gender-test incident, Weir called the terms masculine and feminine "very old fashioned," adding, "There's a whole generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with." My own paradise would not involve throwing out masculinity and femininity or sex and race all together. They can serve as sources of pleasure, strength, community, and solidarity, inside and outside the sport, in ways that do not require policing them. If people of all genders could express, present, or perform in sport in whatever gendered ways they wanted to--which might or might not match up with the way they present themselves in other contexts--that would make for a more joyous sport. But Weir's distaste for having people define others by those terms gestures to effects of gender policing beyond fitting people into categories. As he states in Welcome to My World, being called "flamboyant" instead of "athlete" is another.

Read an excerpt from the article at the African American performance group Souls Grown Deep:

Unprecedented as it was, Souls Grown Deep was forced to the periphery of the Olympic stage. A vital opportunity was missed to give international visibility to the South’s unique community of African American self-taught artists. This essay examines the social and cultural processes that exalted a banal global art show while suppressing a landmark African American visual performance. This is a case study of the cultural politics of Atlanta, the vested interests of the fine art and folk art worlds, and, most of all, of the performative power of art exhibitions themselves. In Atlanta, the experiential knowledge embedded in the African American artists’ modes of creation and communication in Souls Grown Deep provided a potent social counterpoint to a falsely transcendent Olympic vision embodied in Rings.

My relationship with the Olympics continued after my dissertation was complete and I began my life as a professor at Plattsburgh State University. Within months of arriving in Plattsburgh, I audaciously asked if I could leave the following fall semester to go with NBC in a supervisor role to the Sydney Games. I was indoctrinated: I was part of a small group of highly specialized people who drop everything for several weeks during an Olympic year and gather together, working for whatever network is broadcasting the Games. It is a unique group, knowledgeable in multiple languages, geography, world politics, and specific random sports (from gymnastics to curling to judo, in which it is legal, by the way, to break your opponent's arm as a means to win). Plattsburgh graciously worked out a way for me to go, which included teaching an honors seminar--The Black Athlete--online from Sydney. I returned with more life-altering experiences: watching Marion Jones run, sitting in the bleachers as the United States beat Cuba for the baseball gold medal and listening to rumors that Castro was in the house, and again witnessing a spectacular Closing Ceremony. I reworked the dissertation after returning from Sydney, and by the time Salt Lake City rolled around I was in the final editing phases of my book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, more confident than ever of the viability of sports, especially the Olympics, as a fruitful site to examine how the world works, whether in terms of my own focus on exploring how ideas of race and nation are culturally manufactured, or the broader goals of determining where in the world politics exists.

February 09, 2014

February 9 marks the centennial of the birth of country music star Ernest Tubb, who stormed the country music scene in the 1940s with a new honky tonk sound and a string of hits that included “Walking the Floor Over You.”

We published Ronnie Pugh's biography of Tubb in 1996. Pugh will celebrate the centennial today in Nashville with a panel discussion on Tubb's life and legacy at the Nashville Public Library. Here's an excerpt from the preface of his book, about why he is a Tubb fan.

Why did I become an Ernest Tubb fan? Why does anyone? Delving into my psyche and my past for a subjective look at the great Tubb career, maybe I can answer the second question alongside the first.

My Tubb fandom was in many ways against the grain, a leap I had to make across generational and cultural barriers. I grew up in a comfortable, middle class, East Texas home, one of three grocer's sons. A mid-baby-boomer (born 1953), I was seriously out of step with more publicized members of my generation; but then, if I hadn't been, I might never have loved Ernest Tubb. From my parents I first learned certain values that I have never seriously questioned. We were Republicans well before most Texans were, liking Ike (and Richard Nixon), at odds with our "Yellow Dog Democrat" surroundings, which had been Ernest Tubb's East Texas a generation before. Even more antithetical, perhaps, to any appreciation of Ernest Tubb was a belief instilled by my old-school Methodist parents, that decent people do not smoke or drink. It pains me to go into a nightclub to hear a country singer, though on rare occasions I have done it.

The lifestyle chronicled in so many country songs may have been worlds away from mine, but the music was always acceptable, to my parents and to me, and I warmly embraced it. It was my first and only favorite popular music, the choice of my adolescent years, and I never once wavered in the face of peerpressure from my rock-loving contemporaries. Mom loved and taught us the music of her youth—gospel that ranged from Stamps-Baxter to the Cokesbury (Methodist) Hymnal—and Dad, though not musical himself, was a big country music fan. He had actually seen Rodgers perform in Marshall in 1932, an admirable accomplishment that I rated right up there with his attending the first All-Star game in Chicago the next year.

In the spring of 1966, I first saw Ernest Tubb on television, and Tubb's TV show soon became my hands-down favorite. I agonized when Saturday afternoon NBC baseball games of unplanned length preempted, The Ernest Tubb Show, though I've always loved and still love baseball. Just a few weeks after meetingTubb through television I bought my very first album, at the Famous Discount center in my hometown of Marshall, Texas: Ernest Tubb's debut LP with Loretta Lynn. In the next few months I purchased every Tubb LP that Marshall stores carried; a few more years passed before I knew about mailorder from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop.

For years Tubb records topped my want lists, and during high school years I started tuning in the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. If Ernest was on the Luzianne Coffee show at 8:30, then I'd do my best to stay up right on through the Midnite Jamboree, to hear his songs and to learn where he and the Texas Troubadours would be playing in coming weeks. I gladly forsook a high school band trip to Galveston, Texas, to see Tubb in person for the frrst time on Shreveport's Louisiana Hayride, March 22,1969. Concerts that I attended were so rare as to be memorable. I guess most of his East Texas-area dates were at nightclubs like Longview's Reo Palm Isle, where I wouldn't dream of going, even if I'd been old enough—but there were always fan club publications, infrequent new records, and best of all, new old records. What struck me from the beginning was Tubb's sheer staying power. At the time Tubb was still a major star and a force to be reckoned with, a full twenty-five years after his first hits. Thinking back now on those impressionable days, I recall that veterans in all walks of life fascinated me. A favorite TV show was David Wolper's Biography; my favorite baseball player just before his retirement was Warren Spahn, who pitched his last in 1965, the year before I discovered the great country music veteran Ernest Tubb via syndicated television. Small wonder that history later became my academic major. I could not have said just why longevity as such impressed me; I did not then infer from it such admirable qualities as perseverance, flexibility, or determination. One new Tubb record I particularly enjoyed from those days even spoke (tongue in cheek, perhaps) of his own staying power-looking ahead to the day "When My Getup Has Got Up and Gone."

It never occurred to me then that Ernest Tubb was not a "good" (i.e., "trained," "smooth," "melodious") singer; unlike the drunks hanging around the jukeboxes, I never imagined I could do as well or better. I only knew that he was fun to listen to, even on the sad songs. He enjoyed singing, and he made me enjoy his singing. I discovered him through television, and there I could plainly see a man singing right through a smile. Tubb had fun teasing his band during instrumental breaks, and he faced the camera with a succession of smiles and winks. Only years later could I divorce that visual image from his sound sufficiently to realize a truth that his radio audience of a previous generation had perceived: Ernest Tubb sang with an audible smile. You didn't have to see him: something in that warm, drawling baritone told you he was happy.

The songs themselves had a directness, simplicity, and clarity that made them easy to understand and easy to remember. "Waltz across Texas" and "There's a Little Bit of Everything in Texas" naturally appealed to a fellow Texan. While our shared Texas origins went some distance toward cementing my admiration of Tubb, the same factor didn't help his TV show co-star Willie Nelson; I couldn't wait for the idiosyncratic Willie to quit so I could hear more of Tubb. Ernest Tubb matched each song to the appropriate emotion. I sympathized when he sang "Our Baby's Book," and while I certainly didn't know what "l've been untrue" meant, it was as though he felt and made me feel the narrator's anguish for wrongdoings in another early favorite, "Try Me One More Time."

When I later saw Ernest Tubb on stage—several times ultimately—my admiration increased. Here was a man who'd go to almost any lengths to please his fans. He certainly pleased me, and I could tell he pleased the others who came. At his best on stage before a live audience, Tubb seemed genuinely glad that you cared enough to come; you left a concert feeling almost that you had done him a favor. That kind of favor you wanted to do more often.

Reading about Ernest Tubb in country music's periodical literature—the record of his many accomplishments and the words of praise from his peers—learning, in short, what he meant to country music certainly enhanced his appeal for me. That's still true, even after the years of research that went into this book (including those years of fandom only, which I didn't know at the time were research years). I have tried to be objective, to rise above mere fandom, in this book; but I can truthfully say that learning of Ernest Tubb's darker side, his human failings, has not lessened my esteem for him or my love for his music.

February 07, 2014

The Sochi Olympics get underway tonight. Erica Rand, author of Red Nails, Black Skates, loves figure skating but hates the way atheletes are expected to conform to race and gender norms in our Olympic narratives. She offers us this guest post.

On Sunday, January 11th, I watched on the Jumbotron at the U.S. Figure Skating (USFS) championships as the organization’s president announced the selection of fourth-place Ashley Wagner over third-place Japanese American Mirai Nagasu to the 2014 U.S. Olympic team, making the “Ladies” contingent a contested trio of white blonds. Ever since, I’ve been raging and sad about the sedimented and raced histories of privilege that contribute to the obfuscating image of the Olympics as an extravaganza of sports transcending politics. I’ve forced the topic onto every polite or captive audience I could find— students, colleagues, friends, strangers on a bathroom line—complete with details can only be told long-windedly to people who don’t follow figure skating (i.e. virtually everyone I’ve mentioned): how USFS made unprecedented use of its selection policy to elevate someone who had competed badly there; how strict use of the policy might have instead booted silver medalist Polina Edmunds, an unexpected stand-out but new to the highest level of skating, or altered the men’s or pairs teams; how Wagner’s decisively lower score for a program leaden by her own account (and I saw it live!) seemed inflated besides; how even people defending the decision knew that “this never would have happened if Mirai hadn’t shown up without a coach,” suggesting insider knowledge of insider influence; and, finally, although I could go on and on (ask me for 1000 more words about that coaching situation), how USFS and NBC had an obvious predicament when Wagner blew it because they had already been promoting her as an Olympic contender—and, implicitly, as a contestant for an unofficial title that, as the cover of the latest TV Guide indicates, now has a new frontrunner in the Ladies gold medalist. Atop one of the assembled photographs of promising (white) U.S. Olympic athletes, the caption reads “Gracie Gold: Will She be America’s Next Sweetheart?”

For that title—sometimes known as “Darling of the Olympics” and lucrative for athletes, their sport, and the media alike—Wagner, Edmunds, and Gold have a key credential that Nagasu lacks: the glorious glow of flowing blond hair that signals, if not always accurately, the highest echelons of whiteness and proper heterosexual femininity. That’s why the “darling” or “sweetheart” usually comes from figure skating, a sport where heterosexual-looking femininity wins medals as well as public affection. (Stop here for a moment and ask yourself whether every single high-level female figure skater in history could possibly have been heterosexual. Ask yourself whether everyone skating as female, queer or straight, could possibly prefer to move and dress in ways that signal straight, especially when people read sexuality, badly, off gender. Then ask yourself why all the murmuring and exposé about the figure skating “closet” is almost exclusively focused on harm to men.) At Vancouver in 2010, where NBC virtually ignored Nagasu until she came in an impressive fourth against formidable opponents and where her U.S. teammate Rachel Flatt had the pale skin but not the pizzazz, that role went to skier Lindsay Vonn. Meanwhile, NBC upped its flowing-white-straight-girl-hair quotient through glamor shots of the female snowboarders that preceded the sight of them about to begin their half-pipe runs in baggy grunge-esque team uniforms and helmets.

I would hardly argue that USFS dumped Nagasu in order to get three shots at the Olympics’ big blond halo. Nor, clearly, does Nagasu’s situation remotely approach the Olympics’ biggest injustice. As David Zirin well itemized in October on the 45th anniversary of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising theirs fists on the Olympic medal stands, we need an Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), like the one that they participated in, now as much as ever. “Host” nations displace urban poor people, compete on stolen indigenous land, harm the environment, and initiate or continue bigoted, violent, and repressive policies and practices. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) still forces “sex-verification testing,” which, like Smith and Carlos, made its Olympic debut in 1968, on athletes in female-tagged events accused of not looking or competing female enough; tests based on bad science are thrown at racialized gender-norm policing and foul linkings of supreme athleticism with maleness. The IOC also maintains backward criteria for the participation of transgender athletes (in a system always excluding athletes who can’t conform to gender binarism). It requires “sex-reassignment” surgeries unrelated to athletic performance and the so-called level playing field, which, of course, is largely mythical anyway when you factor in training advantages linked to money, influence, opportunity, connections, status, bias, and privilege that affect who can become a contender in the first place. I could go on and on about that, too. But for now, I’ll stick with Mirai.

February 04, 2014

RSS feeds are often overlooked, but they are powerful tools that can help you keep up-to-date with the growing number of journals and media outlets in your research. Start saving time by using Duke University Press’s RSS feeds.

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is a service that automatically sends you new content from sites that you care about. RSS feeds make it easy to stay informed about academic journals, blogs, social media, news organizations, podcasts, and almost any content published on the Internet. The advantage of RSS feeds is that you don’t have to constantly monitor all the websites that you follow. The new content comes straight to you on an RSS feed reader like Digg Reader or Feedly, which are both great apps and typically free.

We like these readers because they are well designed and already configured for mobile devices, which instantly makes your journal an “app-like” reading experience.

Setting up an RSS feed reader, using Feedly:

1. First, you will need to open a Feedly account. Feedly uses your Google account, so you can either log in using your Google credentials or create a new log in. Log in and/or accept Feedly’s use of your account information.

2. Next you will see a search box where you can enter a topic, a URL, or the title of a publication. We recommend entering the exact URL of the RSS feed that you would like to subscribe to.

All of Duke University Press’s journals have RSS feeds available and, in some cases, several options. Using our journal Camera Obscura as an example, you will find the RSS feeds on the journal’s HighWire landing page.

3. Clicking on the RSS Feed link circled above will lead you to a page with several feed options:

4. Suppose we want to stay informed of newly published issues. Click the “Current issue only” RSS feed. This will take you to a page where, depending on your browser, you will see either the actual coding of the current issue or a listing of the articles, similar to a table of contents. Copy and paste this page’s URL in the search box back on Feedly’s site to set up your RSS subscription. In the Camera Obscura example, you’d enter the URL, http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/rss_feeds/current.xml.

5. Camera Obscura will appear in the search results column. Click “Camera Obscura” and you will come to a page with the contents of the most recent issue and a green button labeled “add to my feedly” Click that and you will be able to assign it to a category in your account.

6. You’re done! All new articles of Camera Obscura will now be delivered straight to your Feedly account. Feedly has great mobile apps for reading on tablets and smartphones.

Two tips for making the most of your Feedly account:

Because content may be behind an access wall, you can ask your institution for remote VPN (virtual private network) access for your computer or mobile device. You can also bookmark articles of interest in your Feedly account and revisit them when you are on a network with access or have more time to read.

To organize your articles, you can bookmark your favorites, add tags to articles to help you find them later, export an item to Evernote, or e-mail it to a friend or yourself.

We hope that RSS feeds will save you time and help keep your articles organized, as well as stay up-to-date on our most recent scholarship!